Sessions at RailsConf 2012 about Ruby

Monday 23rd April 2012

Based on Chapter 4 of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, “Rails-flavored Ruby” covers the aspects of the Ruby programming language most important for developing Rails applications. Topics include hashes, arrays, and other objects; blocks; functions; and classes.

Tuesday 24th April 2012

While Node.js is the hot new kid on the block, evented libraries like EventMachine for Ruby and Twisted for Python have existed for a long time. When does it make sense to use one over the other? What are the advantages and disadvantages to using node over ruby? In this talk, you will learn how to get the same power of concurrency enjoyed by Node.js while continuing to write in the language you know and love. Topics covered will include pubsub with redis or faye, building evented rack applications, and running evented applications alongside existing Rails apps.

Although XMPP is most often used as a chat protocol, it can also provide a robust asynchronous communication channel in other application scenarios. In this presentation, we will provide introduction to Strophe.js, XMPP4R, and ejabberd, which are the XMPP components that we use to integrate our device automation framework and living room devices under test. By using these off-the-shelf components, we addressed our needs for getting around internal firewalls, application security (based on SASL), and asynchronous command-response handling.

Wednesday 25th April 2012

MiniTest is the no-nonsense testing framework you already know how to use. If we strive for cleaner and simpler code in our own work, wouldn't it be nice to have that in our test framework too? Whether you're a Test Unit fan or RSpec fan, you'll feel right at home using MiniTest. Its simplicity makes it fast, easy to use, extendable, and maybe most importantly, easy to understand. Plus, Rails 4 uses MiniTest.

Other programming languages have powerful features that are often enviable while working in Ruby: Python’s function decorators, Scala’s partial evaluation, and Haskell’s lazy evaluation, among others. Fortunately, Ruby’s metaprogramming facilities give us the ability to add these features to Ruby ourselves, without the need for the core language to be changed.

This talk will walk through adding simple (yet functional) versions of the previously mentioned features to Ruby, using Ruby, and discuss the dos and don’ts of responsible Ruby metaprogramming.